Thursday, October 07, 2010

the last book I read

Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd.

It's 1770, and Thomas Chatterton is a poet, born and brought up in the shadow of St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol, but now in London to attempt to make his literary fortune.

It's also 1856, and painter Henry Wallis is working on a depiction of Chatterton's death, using aspiring writer George Meredith as a model.

It's also something approximating to the present day (the novel was published in 1987), and aspiring writer Charles Wychwood is having a slightly peculiar encounter with an eccentric couple who run an antique shop in Kensington. He eventually emerges having swapped a couple of books for a painting which caught his eye, a portrait which his friend Philip declares depicts none other than Thomas Chatterton. The only thing is, Chatterton is supposed to have died at the age of 17, and the painting depicts a man in middle age. Intrigued, Charles returns to the shop to find out where the portrait came from and is directed to a Mr. Joynson in Bristol. In Bristol he acquires a couple of bags of old papers whose contents suggest that Chatterton may have faked his death and continued to write, under a variety of pseudonyms, for many more years. Well, that would explain the painting, anyway.

Various other characters join the action, firstly Charles' wife Vivien, who works at a London art gallery, the proprietors of which may or may not have just been duped into buying some fake paintings. Then we meet eccentric novelist Harriet Scrope, who is employing Charles to assist with her biography, but is also haunted by guilt at an undiscovered bit of literary plagiarism in one of her early books.

So you can see the emerging theme here: authenticity, fakery, the impossibility of really knowing the provenance of a piece of art unless you happened to have been present at its creation, the question of whether knowing the provenance of a piece of art makes any difference to its merit, that sort of thing. In addition to the multiple layers of all this in the book, there are others outside it: Chatterton, Wallis and Meredith were all real people who lived much as they are depicted as having lived in the book: Chatterton made his name with a series of poems allegedly penned by a 15th-century monk called Thomas Rowley; Wallis was not a faker in as obvious a way, but of course the most famous existing depiction of Chatterton, his painting, in fact depicts George Meredith, whom Wallis only employed as a model because he was working up to running off with his wife.

Eventually Charles' obsession with the Chatterton painting and manuscripts leads him to have some sort of stroke which eventually proves fatal. In the aftermath of this Philip takes it upon himself to take the manuscripts back to Bristol to determine their origin, and Harriet Scrope takes the painting of the older Chatterton to Vivien's art gallery for the same purpose. Both are eventually revealed to be fake.

It's all very clever, the brief interludes back in time to catch up with Chatterton and Wallis being played pretty straight, while the main present-day bit of the narrative has some archly farcical moments: the catty interaction between Harriet and her best friend Sarah Tilt, and the pair of screamingly camp old gay couples - Mr. Joynson and partner in Bristol and Mr. Cumberland and Mr. Maitland, the proprietors of the art gallery. In fact the general tone of the book might be said to be a blackly ironic raised eyebrow throughout. It perhaps revels in its own cleverness a bit too much, and there's no sense (in the present-day sections anyway) that real people actually behave in this way, but considering the potentially dusty and uninviting subject matter this is very entertaining and easy to read. Not perhaps quite as obvious a poolside lager accompaniment as the previous one, but it seemed to work out OK.

Chatterton was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1987, and is in fact the second book in this series from that year's list, the first being The Colour Of Blood. Other unsuccessful Booker nominees in this list are: The Children Of Dynmouth (1976), The 27th Kingdom (1982), Utz (1988), The Gate Of Angels and Amongst Women (1990), Every Man For Himself (1996), Unless (2002), The Accidental (2005) and On Chesil Beach (2006), plus of course the solitary winner, 1972's G.

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